The mystery of the Trump coalition

Last weekend, Donald Trump added to his long list of bold claims by declaring himself the champion of a new “silent majority” of Americans.

While 17 percent of Republican voters isn’t a majority, and the 4,000 raucous supporters cheering him in Arizona were anything but silent, Trump has hurtled to the top of several recent GOP primary polls. Apparently, he speaks for some Americans. So who are they and where did they come from?

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As it turns out, the Trump coalition looks a lot like the rest of the Republican Party. Other than a spike in support in the Northeast, there is little in recent polling data to distinguish Trump’s supporters from the heart of the GOP primary electorate. Even immigration hardliners support him at the same rate as the rest of the Republican Party.

Interviews with Trump supporters at a rally on Saturday in Phoenix and in New Hampshire, where he was among the first candidates to hire staffers, suggest he is attracting Republicans from many corners of the party who are drawn to his image as a straight-talking businessman who would shake up politics as usual.

“The issues that are driving the average Trump voter are, first and foremost, that he’s not a politician. Secondly, he is self-funding his campaign, so he can’t be bought,” said Steve Stepanek, Trump’s New Hampshire co-chairman, who supported Newt Gingrich in 2012 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008.

“People today are looking for plainspoken people who say what’s on their mind,” said Lou Gargiulo, a New Hampshire activist and Trump’s Rockingham County co-chair who supported Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries.

Trump voters skew older, whiter and more male, but no more so than the rest of the Republican primary electorate.

In a Monmouth poll released on Monday that put Trump in second place and a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released on Tuesday that put him in first, the real estate mogul fared better among somewhat conservative voters and very conservative secular voters than he did among moderates and religious conservatives.

At least in that way, said Murray, they really are like Richard Nixon’s silent majority of middle Americans. “They’re in the middle of the Republican Party. They’re not evangelicals. They’re not hardline social or fiscal conservatives. They’re also not on the liberal side of the party,” he said.

Because Trump had flirted with running for president before without jumping in, many observers doubted he would do so, and most polls before mid-May did not include his name.

Trump’s rise came so suddenly and unexpectedly, and Republican voters are divided among so many candidates, that the data to fully understand the Trump coalition does not yet exist, said Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown.

What Murray can say definitively about Trump is that he is an anomaly. In a Monmouth poll released a month ago, Trump had the worst favorability rating of any Republican candidate among Republican voters, 20 percent favorable to 55 percent unfavorable, a fact cited by many political observers in pooh-poohing his viability. In the poll out this week, Trump’s favorability has pulled nearly even at 41-40. The swing was even more dramatic among self-identified tea party voters, who went from viewing him unfavorably, 55 percent to 20 percent, to viewing him favorably 56 percent to 26 percent.

“I’ve never seen a candidate who’s so well known who was able to suddenly turn around people’s opinions of him,” Murray said.

Even as Republican elites decried his claims about the alleged criminality of undocumented Mexican immigrants (which defy all available evidence) and brands cut ties with him, a large chunk of GOP primary voters were evaluating him in a positive light.

Joan Riscki, 67, a Phoenix resident and retiree, is an independent who voted for Mitt Romney in the general election in 2012. “I usually vote for Democrats, but it’s a bad situation now,” she told POLITICO outside Trump’s rally on Saturday. “They’re all liars anyways. I try not to listen to the news. I listen to KFYI,” a local conservative talk radio station.

Matt Bates, 52, a property manager from Scottsdale, who remains uncommitted to a presidential candidate, said he found out about the Trump event from his in-laws, who had heard about it on Fox News. “He’s not a politician, he’s a businessman,” Bates said of Trump’s appeal.

His wife, Stephanie, 52, a grocery store manager, said she supports Trump. “His views are similar to the GOP, but he’s not in anybody’s pocket,” she said. “You can’t trust the rest of them.”

Hazel Powell, 68, also of Phoenix, is a retired Peace Corps volunteer (she felt the need to leave the country after Obama’s election) and a fan of “The Apprentice,” Trump’s reality show on NBC. “I’ve always liked Donald with his television shows, his aggressiveness. He just speaks the truth,” she said.

The crowd in Phoenix was overwhelmingly white (as is the Republican primary electorate), and Trump’s fellow Republicans have condemned his comments about undocumented immigrants as racist, but Powell said he would eventually win over Latinos. “The Latinos are going to support him because they’re smart enough to know: He’s going to get them jobs.”

Trump has made the same claim, saying that “tens of thousands” of Latinos have worked for him over the years and that they “love” him.

Greg Moore, the state director for the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, which lost several staffers to Trump’s Granite State effort, has gotten an up-close look at the mogul’s supporters. His offices share a building with Trump’s campaign. He said he sees a lot of unfamiliar faces coming and going from Trump’s New Hampshire headquarters — not the state’s typical Republican activist crowd.

“They seem to be galvanized [by] a notion that Washington is hopelessly corrupt – and you need somebody who is completely outside of the process to go in there and shake things up,” he said. “Immigration really isn’t an issue in New Hampshire, but for a lot of these folks, I think immigration speaks more broadly to a federal government that’s not doing its job as effectively as they think it should be or could be.”

Despite Trump’s recent success capitalizing on widespread discontent with Washington, establishment Republicans say they aren’t worried his support will make him a viable candidate.

“I don’t think in the end, people when they vote in the primary will throw their vote away,” said Judd Gregg, a former senator and New Hampshire governor. “They’re not going to vote for somebody who isn’t a legitimate candidate for the nomination who can win the nomination and can govern.”